The Past Tense Debate Revisited: Electrophysiological Evidence for Subregularities of Irregular Verb Inflection

Abstract

Neuropsychological research investigating mental grammar and lexicon has largely been based on the processing of regular and irregular inflection. Past tense inflection of regular verbs is assumed to be generated by a syntactic rule (e.g., show-ed), whereas irregular verbs consist of rather unsystematic alternations (e.g., caught) represented as lexical entries. Recent morphological accounts, however, hold that irregular inflection is not entirely rule-free but relies on morphological principles. These subregularities are computed by the syntactic system. We tested this latter hypothesis by examining alternations of irregular German verbs as well as pseudowords using ERPs. Participants read series of irregular verb inflection including present tense, past participle, and past tense forms embedded in minimal syntactic contexts. The critical past tense form was correct (e.g., er sang [he sang]) or incorrect by being either partially consistent (e.g., *er sung [*he sung]) or inconsistent (e.g., *er sing [*he sing]) with the proposed morphological principles. Correspondingly, in a second experimental block, pseudowords (e.g., tang/*tung/*ting) were presented. ERPs for real words revealed a biphasic ERP pattern consisting of a negativity and P600 for both incorrect forms in comparison to the correct equivalents. Most interestingly, the P600 amplitude for the incorrect forms was gradually modulated by the type of anomaly with medium amplitude for consistent past tense forms and largest amplitude for inconsistent past tense forms. ERPs for pseudoword past tense forms showed a similar gradual modulation of N400. The findings support the assumption that irregular verbs are processed by rule-based mechanisms because of subregularities of their past tense inflection.

The Influence of Distraction on Speech Processing: How Selective is Selective Attention?

“…In contrast to Experiment 1, the results of Experiment 2, in which a syntactic judgement task was used that directly drew the participants' attention to the critical verbs and, thus, triggered the subjects to carry out a syntactic evaluation, revealed significant ERP results. While the effect we found in our study was a broadly distributed negativity similar to an N400, the ERP components observed in similar studies by Regel et al [12], [18] were a biphasic LAN-P600 pattern. The latter was clearly associated with syntactic processes; however, our results indicate a different neural processing.…”

“…Regel, Opitz, Müller and Friederici [12] manipulated German irregular verbs embedded in minimal syntactic contexts (i.e. phrases).…”

“…As the incorrect unattested condition used by Regel et al [12] reflects a pattern which is dispreferred across many languages (cf. [13], [14]), this condition represented the most severe violation.…”

“…Therefore, it is possible that such an unnatural pattern could be recognized and processed automatically even if it is located in the unattended parts of a sentence. To further investigate this, we used a selection of the manipulated irregular verbs utilized by Regel et al (2015) and presented them in otherwise syntactically and semantically correct sentences in German applying two different types of attentional tasks (a semantic judgement task diverting the attention away from the critical stimuli and a syntactic judgement task drawing the attention to the critical stimuli). To further examine whether the severity of the violations influences automatic speech processing, irregular verbs appearing in three different conditions were used in the present study: the correct past tense form, an incorrect past tense form with an attested ablaut pattern, and an incorrect past tense form following a crosslinguistically unattested ablaut pattern (cf.…”

Some consequences of the Tolerance Principle

“…Gries seems to uphold the idea that whole-unit frequency effects -if real, though not in the present case -automatically counts against compositionality. This is a dogma from the past tense debate as pointed out in the target article; see Yang (2002), Taft (2004), Fruchter and Marantz (2015), Regel et al (2015) for acquisition, processing, and neurological evidence for compositional approaches to whole-unit frequency effects.…”